Nothin'. Nada. Zilch.

Search in Iraq Fails to Find Nuclear Threat (washingtonpost.com)

"I've never seen a government like this."

I have. But not in the US.

The New Yorker: Fact

Thank goodness for NPR.

To quote the late, great Firefly: "It's a real burn being right so often."

t r u t h o u t - Study Finds Direct Link Between Misinformation and Public Misconception

The other shoe

I've been feeling a frustration so deep about the current political, economic, social, and foreign policy climates that it's bordering on rage. Seriously. I told Sal the other day that if he were in the military and I were facing the prospect of a YEAR without him because the Shrub didn't have the foresight to think about the fucking long-term logistics and anticipate the consequences of alienating the better portion of the free fucking world, I would be angry enough to consider the whole automatic weapon on the White House lawn thing. And this from a pragmatic pacifist, whatever the fuck that is.

The one and only time I ever felt this oppressiveness, this despair of inescapable something-so-bad-I-can't-find-the-right-word-for-it, I was living at home and counting down the days when I could get the hell out of there. So I've got some unaddressed issues, tell me something I don't know. Regardless, the point is, this level of helplessness drives me absolutely bat-shit crazy. I feel like the wild animals you see in zoos, pacing the cages relentlessly. In other news, I hate zoos. I've always empathized with those poor creatures but how depressing that I feel it more acutely now than ever. I realized about a month ago that I've got this undercurrent of anxiety that's familiar but so long-forgotten that I hadn't been able to put my finger on it for awhile.

Well, now I've put my finger on it and it's uncomfortably similar to finding a bomb a split-second before it goes off. Yep, that's definitely it. I'm waiting for the bomb to go off. Figuratively and otherwise.

Oh, yes I am.

Looks like it was just one of those mysterious things. I guess I could go back and delete that other "test" post. But I don't think I will. It's rather representative of most of my life.

So.

A little about me to anyone who might be reading this. Who isn't me. Or my husband.

I've created this blog to express some of the things I can't say in either my monthly newsletter or on my website but that I'd like to say somewhere. Oh, yes. I have a website. Or, to be more precise, my husband and I have a website. It's thehallway.net if you're interested. And I hope you are, because we're proud of it. Nothing more than your average, run-of-the-mill personal website, nothing really different about it than the millions of others out there. Except that it's ours.

So I write. A lot. I don't do it for a living, although I do live to do it, so there you go. There're a lot of things I can't say in our monthly newsletter (which predates our website by about four years) or on our website, simply because our grandparents read both of them faithfully and if I wrote "fuck" anywhere, I'd never hear the end of it. That's okay, though. It's been good practice to express myself without resorting to profanity. Not that I'm particularly foul-mouthed or anything, but it's kind of hard to rant about grammar or telemarketing without resorting to a good old "fucking morons" or "goddamned assholes". Although I did attempt to do both without any cursing whatsoever. It worked, but it hurt.

grammar rant

telemarketing rant

To be perfectly honest, I will be gobstopped if anyone else reads anything I write here. But there's just something about publishing something that you've written where anyone else can read it, even if no one's likely to read it all.

This is going to be fun.

Apparently, I'm not as smart as I thought I was.

Because I just tried publishing my very first blog post and it seems to've vanished into the ether. If the illiterate troglodytes out there can figure this out, so can I. Hope this isn't my very first posting, though.

Because that. Would suck.